


The Survivor's Guide to Deserted Islands or: 1001 Fun Things to Do with Coconuts

by misura



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Community: slashfest, Desert Island, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-29
Updated: 2007-03-29
Packaged: 2017-11-01 23:53:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/362690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sun! Beach! Coconuts!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Survivor's Guide to Deserted Islands or: 1001 Fun Things to Do with Coconuts

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: _Jim/Blair - Jim and Blair are shipwrecked on a deserted island for months. Me Tarzan, you Jim._

"Look at it from the bright side," said Blair.

"What bright side?" said Jim, wishing there were some pebbles he could kick - unfortunately, he'd lost his shoes and they were on a beach, so his choice of objects to kick was limited to 1) sand, 2) seashells and 3) Blair, neither of which seemed very attractive, since kicking sand was just useless, kicking seashells sounded like a great way to get seashellparts stuck in his feet and kicking Blair ... well, kicking Blair might be a good idea, at that. Jim would take it under consideration.

"No tourists," said Blair. "No seedy hotels. No lousy food. No pushy street-vendors. No people next door who complain about us making too much noise. No tour-guides. Nothing to spoil our experience of a wonderful piece of nature, unspoilt by mankind's touch."

"I thought we were going to some small African country nobody I talked to had ever heard of because you said it'd be good for me to go out and meet people from a completely different culture," Jim said.

Blair waved this away as completely unimportant. "That was just to convince you to drop that whacky idea of yours to go to London. Besides, there may well be natives around here." Blair sounded pleased at the prospect. "They might think we're gods."

"They might think we're dinner," Jim said.

Blair sent him a disapproving look. "That's negative thinking. We're on a vacation - you should be thinking happy thoughts."

"Correction: we're stranded on some deserted island, miles away from the civilized world, with no food, no water, no clothes aside from the ones we're wearing, no tents, no backpacks, no - " Okay, for a kiss like that, Jim supposed he could forego the pleasure of kicking Blair for getting them into this mess, more or less. "No lube," he added, to make it clear to Blair that there would be No Sex.

"If we find any natives, I'm sure I'll be able to figure out how to communicate with them," Blair said. "I studied years for something like this."

"That's great, Sandburg. I'm so happy for you," said Jim. "Did that study of yours by any chance also teach you how to make sure we stay alive long enough for you to be able to establish first contact with the natives and kindly ask them to point us to the nearest working phone?"

"Well, no." Blair looked uncertain for perhaps two seconds. "But I'm sure it can't be that hard."

"Do you want to bet on that?" asked Jim.

"Hey, look, aren't those coconuts?" said Blair.

 

"You're actually pretty good at this," Blair said. He sounded a little disappointed - which was totally uncalled for, in Jim's opinion. "I guess you picked up some stuff in the army."

"Some," said Jim. This place wasn't quiet - not like it had been at sea - but it wasn't exactly Cascade either. Not a lot of humans around here - just Blair, really. It was half-uncomfortable and half-kind-of-fun, because Blair being the only human around made Jim extremely aware of him.

Jim wondered how he'd be able to sleep, with Blair's breathing and heartbeat to listen to, and Blair's heat to sense - close enough to notice, but not to touch. The birds were kind of loud, too, now that he thought about it. (Eggs for breakfast sounded nice, but without anything to cook or bake them with, that might get a bit of a problem.) Lots of insects, too, showing up now that the sun was setting.

"We usually had tents and cooking gear with us," Jim added.

"Sleeping bags," Blair said dreamily. 

"Those, too. Although, really, I'm more worried about how we can get a fire going." In theory, he knew. In theory, probably every man who'd ever read comics as a boy knew how to get a fire going - two wooden sticks, a small pile of inflammable, dry stuff and a bit of perseverance. A piece of glass might do the trick, too, assuming the sun was willing to oblige.

In practice, Jim knew it'd probably turn out to be a lot less simple.

 

"I've heard you can do a lot of things with these," Blair said.

"Oh yeah?" Jim clung to the ... whatever it was that you called the part of the palmtree where you could actually more or less use your legs and one hand to not fall down, and keep one hand free to try and wrestle the tree for the possession of a coconut. At present, the tree was winning, with six coconuts to Jim's two, but Jim was determined to make a comeback in the second half of the game.

Blair had been assigned catcher - sadly, he was being a rather bad sport about it, and he kept running away when Jim threw coconuts at him, instead of trying to catch them. Jim had offered to change positions, see how Blair would like it up here, only Blair had protested that learning how to climb palmtrees hadn't been part of his academic education, and Jim had translated that as Blair saying he'd be bad at it, and might fall down and get a concussion, which would be all kinds of inconvenient.

"Supposedly, you can even make cheese with them," said Blair. "With the milk."

"You shouldn't believe everything you read, Chief," said Jim.

"I didn't read it - I heard it from one of my fellow-students. And why not? They don't call it milk for nothing," Blair reasoned. "If we find some eggs and flour, we might even make pancakes."

Jim wished he could look down to check the expression on Blair's face. Since he couldn't, he settled for yanking at one of the coconuts extra viciously, which earned him one heart-stopping second of being certain he was going to fall, one coconut and one loudly complaining Blair.

Tree: five, Jim: three and Blair: zero.

Jim sighed and wished he'd brought one of those Swiss army-knives with him that had a sawblade. (Then he imagined himself trying to cut down a tree with a five-inch long sawblade, and decided that actually, he should've simply told Blair they'd be going to London, take it or leave it.)

"Hey, Jim. I was just wondering - you're actually having a pretty good time, aren't you?" Blair asked, sounding unusually serious.

Jim thought about it for a few seconds, for the moment willing to assume that Blair hadn't actually been hit by a coconut and had lost his mind. Was he, in fact, having a pretty good time? Well, he wasn't starving, he hadn't been eaten by predators, natives or mosquitoes (though those last kept trying) and he'd discovered several more interesting things about Blair.

"Maybe."

"Because I've been thinking," Blair said, "and I realized that you'd probably have hated most of the things I put in the original travel-plan. So perhaps it's really a good thing we ended up here."

Jim dropped himself and managed to hit the ground without breaking anything. "You know what, Chief? I think it's time for you to make yourself useful. How about I teach you how to climb one of these? Consider it an opportunity to expand your horizons."

"Uhm," said Blair.


End file.
